On any given day, Galley co-founder Alan Clifford tells that he has 30 to 50 employees busily driving, delivering thousands of Galley's homemade, 600 to 800 calorie meals to D.C. residents. And every night, Clifford says Galley delivers roughly 500 dinners to residents. "By the end of 2016, I am confident we'll be the largest restaurant in D.C.
By the end of the March, Galley will expand to make deliveries to Northern Virginia, Clifford told DC Inno, effectively increasing their potential customer base. For reference, Galley currently takes orders and makes deliveries in D.C. and Baltimore. Later this year there are also plans to launch in a new, east coast city, but Clifford would not comment on which city his startup would soon dive into.
Launched in November of 2014 as a pilot, the company has experienced a meteoric rise by upending D.C.'s food delivery market; a series of competitors who largely serve food prepared by restaurant chains.
For Clifford and Ian Costello, Galley's other founder and a fellow Living Social alum, the rise of their food delivery startup has provided an opportunity to not only rapidly expand operations but to promote their belief that good food should be additive free, locally sourced and freshly made, everyday.
With Galley's daily food menu, customer can schedule the delivery of meals for either lunch or dinner at a predesignated location via an application or on the Internet. The D.C. startup employs a small group of chefs to brainstorm the menu and to prepare the food each morning.
A simple menu, offering just 4 to 5 options for lunch and dinner, makes the ordering process simple and other business operations more efficient, said Clifford. While there are only a few options every day, the cuisine is changed everyday, giving customers a breadth of different choices during a given week. Individual Galley meals typically cost between $12 and $15, with the delivery fee already included.
Even small product decisions are greatly scrutinized and finally decided upon only after a lengthy process, Clifford explained. For example, the farm provide produce for daily meal—like today's potatoes and green beans that are served along a crab cake—are only chosen after an intensive selection process that includes an interview and food tasting, among other things.
Interestingly, repeat customers account for 50 percent of the current clientele base, Clifford told DC Inno.
In addition, Galley, which operates from a sprawling commercial kitchen in Ivy City, is averaging double digit growth every month. Clifford declined to comment specifically on Galley's current revenue, but he said "we are comfortably in the seven figure run rate."
At the tail end of 2015, Galley was delivering meals through UberEATS—the ride hailing behemoth's food delivery venture that has become increasingly popular in D.C. At the time, the move was undoubtedly savvy, as the hype surrounding UberEATS also brought new customers to restaurants. Naturally, these restaurant partners were agreeing to tacitly use Uber's app and contracted drivers to sell their food.
Since then, however, Galley has suspended their partnership with Uber because they would like to "control the full customer experience," which translates into delivery their meals only through previously trained drivers that understand the company's mission, directive and culture. Clifford said he may consider working with Uber again but that he prefers their current model.
"High volume restaurants in D.C., today, are seeing about 1,000 to 1,200 covers a day. The fast casual restaurant chains, like sweetgreen, are maybe around 2,000 per day... We should be able to significantly surpass that by end of year," Clifford told DC Inno.
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Source : Chris Bing http://goo.gl/rkN4gx
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